With new album Hole in Your Pocket, the Panics have finally come home

In 2011, when the Panics released their assured top 10 success Rain on the Humming Wire, affable frontman Jae Laffer​ came home from recording at Woodstock in upstate New York with stories of nights out in Manhattan and a sojourn in an 8th Avenue apartment of a "high society" family who lent him one of John Lennon's acoustic guitars.

Come 2016 and a new album, the seductively panoramic Hole in Your Pocket, and the Perth turned Melbourne band is sticking closer to home.

The five-piece – Laffer, Drew Wootton (guitar), his brother Myles​ (drums), Paul Otway (bass), and Jules Douglas (keyboards) – cut the record in converted shed in inner-city Fitzroy. The peripatetic years have passed.

"I'm happy for the times in my life when doing what I love has led me into the strange corners of the world where you meet cool and crazy people," says Laffer. "But I guess, at the end of the day, the career ambitions took a back seat to making sure I enjoyed the process of making the record."

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"You can't be certain there will be a fantastic response, or that you'll even be heard," he says. "So for me it's more like justifying my time on Earth and making sure that the writing feels true."

The 35-year-old lets the career concerns that obsess too many of his contemporaries wash over him. As well as the chart success of Rain on the Humming Wire, the Panics had something of a hit single in 2008 with Don't Fight It, a song of solemn regret with enough redemptive hope to subsequently soundtrack an episode of Ugly Betty and a double killing on Underbelly. Yet with each step forward the gap between albums grows.

"I wanted to wait for the moment when there was actual stuff to write about. You don't want to sound like you're drifting off into oblivion," Laffer says. "At a certain age you want to have a pride in what you do and not second guess yourself. It's about putting down things I'm proud of."

The five years between releases was also influenced by Laffer recharging his creative battery with a 2013 solo record, When the Iron Glows Red, as well as the birth of his now four-year-old daughter.

His days now revolve around family and the discipline of writing. Every morning he sits down and gets something on the page, more of a poem than a song lyric, and then inspiration intermittently takes hold.

"Even if I write a few lines only, it makes me feel like myself," Laffer says. "One in every four or five days it could be a song, so I'll yell it out loud while I pound on the piano in the key of whatever and for the last year that's given me a song nearly every week."

On Hole in Your Pocket the resulting tracks mix the widescreen grace of the Triffids and the cool elegance of late 1970s Roxy Music. The Panics have always had the ability to transport listeners, to create a sense of momentum that becomes emotive, but more than ever Laffer's lyrics dig into the uncertain equations of the everyday.

"We all dabble in different stuff that's not in our true path, but the problem is that it starts to drain your energy for the good stuff," he says. "Everyone has seen someone find a safe corner where they don't have to be confronted and can put up with things they moderately like. The more that happens the harder it is to take those big steps of courage."

When Laffer sings, "Woke up one morning in a strange uniform," above the synth pulse and plangent guitars that herald the album's opening track Weatherman, he's referring to the moment when we realise that we don't recognise who we've become, or how the world is.

"What you're expected to do in a relationship and the balance you're supposed to have in life tears at people – it can tear at me," Laffer says. "There's so much we do that we're probably not content with."

The upshot of that is by examining this unease and filtering it through his bandmates' soundscapes, Laffer has found his equilibrium. He's never sounded calmer on a Panics album, and the singer knows exactly where that's going to take him.

"We want to be creative people for our whole lives, not just for a few albums in our 20s and early 30s," Laffer says. "I'm in this for life so I have to do stuff for the right reason."

Hole in Your Pocket is released on October 7. The Panics play the Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst, on October 14; and the Howler, Melbourne, on October 15.

Craig Mathieson has been the film critic for The Sunday Age since March 2012, having previously held the same position for Rolling Stone and The Bulletin. The former magazine editor writes widely on film, music and television, and is still able to quote sizeable chunks of the dialogue from Michael Mann's Heat.